Working Life

Consider this crazy number: 150 million people around the globe are migrants, moving here and there, either looking for work or avoiding political violence or both. With the echoes of the attack on undocumented workers in the U.S. firmly in mind, I explored this astounding fact with an expert in Africa and an advocate in […]

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Bernie Sanders has been regularly making the connection between the relentless attack on workers by billionaires and big corporations, on the one hand, and racism and the impoverishment of non-white workers, particularly black workers. And, to boot, he regularly talks about of the importance of a strong organized labor movement–not because he needs a political […]

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Every day, a worker dies somewhere just doing his or her job. And that death rate hits hard particularly communities of color and immigrants because many work in industries and jobs with low pay and very sketchy safety practices.

This is murder at work, the human “cost of doing business” in the glorious “free market”–except there is very little cost to the company. And usually the managers and CEOs skate, getting a fine or some other slap-on-the-wrist.

Those who wear the burden are the family members of the murdered worker.

In this sea of injustice, a glimmer of justice beckons from New York.

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I’m always been suspicious of the “new economy” gurus who promise that the wonders of technologies will, praise be, free everyone from the chains of hard labor–this was essentially the dumb idea behind Robert Reich’s elitist nonsense about “symbolic analysts” (that was the now-discredited idea he probably thought up after he’d pushed for NAFTA and was looking for another way to promote himself). The economy, and the ability to make a living, is always about the ability of workers to have power over their work life, and leverage power to demand decent wages.

Which is why Uber was just a bunch of new exploitation wrapped in the new lingo of the “sharing economy”. A judge has seen through all that.

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